Jeremiah’s Journey launches Big Lottery Fund Project

In July, we were absolutely thrilled to share the news that Jeremiah’s Journey had been awarded a whopping £243,973 from the Big Lottery Fund.

This fantastic funding will be given to the charity in installments over the next three years. This will enable Jeremiah’s Journey to continue to provide our bereavement service for children, young people and families, in addition to supporting families where a parent or carer is terminally ill, which is great news for Plymouth and surrounding areas.

This fantastic opportunity will mean that Jeremiah’s Journey will be able to use the funds raised through individual challenges, community events, legacies and in memory donations for creating new ways of working with families who have experienced the death of someone special.

Monies raised locally have been used to expand our clinical work further and in September 2016 we will see the launch of our brand new programme ‘Grandparents Day,’ which was piloted successfully in July 2016.

Jeremiah’s Journey has seen an increase in referrals for support over the last year and ‘Grandparents Day’ has been developed to ensure that children and young people who have had a grandparent die do not have to wait to receive the support they require to come to terms with their sad news. The pilot programme was well received by families attending.

One Family said:- “I thought today was amazing and it really helped me”.

In response, Jeremiah’s Journey has resourced the roll out of the programme for four times a year as part of the regular work that the charity undertakes.

We are also looking forward to our Winter Group Programme that will be starting in October.

Attending our Group Programme brings children together in their grief, helping them to normalise it, provide comfort and the space to explore both good and bad memories and a mixture of feelings and emotions around their grief, whilst exploring ways of coping.

We use a wide range of creative therapeutic activities within our group and have separate specialised groups for children of primary school age, teenagers of secondary school age and their parents and carers.

At the end of each of our Group programmes we have a trip to Woodlands for the day. We do this because we feel that although the children, young people and families have been through very difficult times it is still incredibly important to HAVE FUN! Woodlands is an opportunity for our families to establish new friendships and make new memories.

At the end of all of our groups we host a review session and this is a chance to gain feedback from our families about what we have done well and what we could do better, this is vital in enabling us to grow and move forward and develop what we do.

We are very excited to see what the next three years has in store for Jeremiahs Journey!